After his introspective Yoga experience, which was rewarded at the FIL in Guadalajara, and shortly before receiving the “Princess of Asturias” award of Letters 2021, Emmanuel Carrère wrote a letter to the head of Le Nouvel Observateur Culture, saying that he wanted to report to him again. In the nineties, he wrote judicial records for the same medium, covering the case against Jean-Claude Romand; a fake doctor who pretended to live a life alien to his reality for decades and eventually killed his family. These chronicles were the starting point for his novel The Enemy; Therefore, the proposal to cover a historic case such as the attacks in the Bataclan hall and on the terraces of Paris on Friday, November 13, 2015, on a weekly basis was consistent with their concerns. and narrative trajectory.
V13 focuses on two comments that went unnoticed during the trial but certainly appear with an asterisk in Carrère’s notebooks. The first of these comes from Salah Abdeslam, one of the main collaborators of the terrorist organization: “Everything you say about us, our jihadists, is as if you were reading the last page of a book. What you need to do is read the book from the beginning. The other comment was made by Pierre Sylvain, one of the Bataclán survivors: “I hope what happened to us becomes a collective story.” Writing this story and reading the book from the beginning are undoubtedly two great ambitions beyond the reach of a single person, but Carrère sets this challenge for himself by going to the Palace for nine months between September 2021 and June 2022. Paris Justice, in order to understand and understand the personality of criminals, to examine their lives and determine the point where they tear, the mysterious point where they turn to lie or crime. Civil statements are emotionally distressing and draining; Therefore, it is not easy to avoid the opposing view advocated by the then Prime Minister Manuel Valls: “To understand is to apologize.” Carrère disagrees with his prime minister and relies on Spinoza’s great principle: Do not judge, do not worry, do not get angry, just understand. This is the subject of what is written in The Enemy, The Lives of Others, and Limonov, when it comes to the experiences of others, or in The Kingdom and Yoga, when it comes to one’s own experiences. At the end of the day, it’s both a human experience and you have to make a real effort to care about others, especially when it comes to individual men like Jean Claude Romand, Limonov, or the Paris terrorists. Moreover, in a trial with global repercussions that is overly ambitious to present the events of Friday night, November 13, 2015, from every angle, from the perspectives of all actors, for nine months.
To cover so much material, the architecture of the trial is divided into sections like a novel: personality, radicalization, Syria, preparations for the attack, completion, escapes, etc., with the logic of “them and us” in its purest form. format. We, the peaceful democrats, are, in Carrère’s words, decent people on whom the judiciary acts like a powerful machine that produces community, bonds, identification. They are against it. Those who are not like us, those we do not know, those we do not understand. In keeping with the architecture of the trial, Carrère decides to structure the book into three parts: victims, defendant, and court.
In the first part, the chronology of the massacre and the journeys of the survivors are recorded through the testimonies of civilians. The revelations leave one stunned at the brutality and hell experienced by young people in the Bataclan hall and on the terraces of Paris on a Friday afternoon with fine weather as we enjoyed the weekend. And Carrère adds another note that cannot be missed in the summary: Patrick Jardin’s statement. While civilization consists of learning to replace the law of retaliation with right, revenge with justice, we must recognize that there is archaic anger that we must learn to overcome, and that it exists because we are human. The unanimous and virtuous speech of the victims that “you will not accept my hatred” is admirable, but perhaps they too quickly silence the Patrick Jardin that we all carry within us and who has been heard at least once in his downtrodden and pained form on the podium. The only anti-amnesty voice among 250 people who would instantly kill those responsible: “They say I’m a right-wing extremist, I might be, but I don’t know; But even if I am on the far right, is my daughter’s death less likely?
In the second part, after the sad and heartbreaking stories of two hundred and fifty people, it is the turn of fourteen men in tracksuits who look at their sneakers behind the reflection of the glass and wait for everything to happen. Asking whether they would also give a speech to those who were exposed to the bombings carried out by the international coalition, including France, in Iraq and Syria since 2014, one of them says, “We did not come out of our mother’s womb with a Kalashnikov.” piece. Carrére undertakes the effort of reading the book from the beginning and analyzing the long historical process that led to this pathological mutation of Islam. As he demonstrated throughout his literary career, it was crucial for him to distinguish between person and action.